Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne and John Stevenson, 2008): USA

Reviewed by Marcus Perfjell. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival 2009.

Kung Fu Panda. The Panda Po is the kind off panda who spends his days daydreaming. He daydreams about being a strong and mighty Kung Fu master – a dragon warrior.<

In reality he works at his fathers “portable restaurant”, doing and serving noodle soup. Po is as far from being a dragon warrior as you possibly can be.

One day the big Kung Fu master Shifu, together with the Feared Five pronounce that they are going to accept a new student. The audition is held on the top of a big mountain in the outskirts of the “Valley of Peace” were Po lives. Po does everything in his power to get accepted as the new student.

Soon it shows that an older student of Shifu’s, Tai Lung, wants to get the ancient dargonrolls which gives the Dragon Warrior amazing powers. Will Shifu accept Po as his student, and train him well enough to beat Tai Lung? 

Po is a panda, Shifu a raccoon, the Feared Five consists of a tiger, a monkey, a snake, a mantis, a crane and tai Lung is supposed to be a snow leopard. 

The most confusing thing about Kung Fu Panda is that Po’s father is a goose.

DreamWorks have taken the CGI-technique one step further with Kung Fu Panda, and sometimes it’s very well done. For example when the wind blows in the snow leopards fur. The story being told is pretty weak in my opinion. Kung Fu Panda only “survives” because of its amazingly choreographed fighting scenes. It’s DreamWorks most violent movie so far, there aren’t a lot of scenes without fighting, and I think the movie should be rated R instead of PG-13. It feels like they’ve made a Jackie Chan movie and animated it. Everything is done with humor and never crosses the line to blood, but I still think that it’s unpleasant in a movie for children.

When it comes to DreamWorks with movies like “Shrek”, the humor is usually meant for all ages. Everybody will laugh at least once. In Kung Fu Panda I only found it funny once, while the younger people in the audience laughed so hard they had trouble with sitting in their chairs. The movie is also unbelievably unstable. In the scenes with no action in them, the story, as well as the narration, is slow as syrup, while the action scenes are fast as lighting. The film stops the clock at around 90 minutes, and with the short presentation before the actual film, it’s hard to sit through the entire thing. Kung Fu Panda won’t get as much credit as movies like Shrek, won’t be a classic like Shrek either, at least not in the western world. Maybe DreamWorks tries to reach an Asian audience with Kung Fu Panda, and the question is; will they make it?

Voices in Kung Fu Panda are done by famous actors like: Dustin Hoffman (Shifu), Jack Black (Po) and Angelina Jolie (Tigress), they do their jobs well.